The national concern for preventing pollution has resulted in both federal and state laws imposing serious penalties for companies causing pollution. Much of the concern is directed to organic chemical compounds because many of the compounds used in manufacturing have been found to be poisonous and/or carcinogenic.
Many industrial processes require the use of organic chemical compounds which are either classified as pollutants or produce products which would be pollutants if allowed into the environment. Thus, industry has been compelled to prevent potential pollutants from entering the environment through the use of costly operations including transforming pollutants into safe compounds, isolating pollutants and having them buried safely, and recycling pollutants to prevent pollution and to obtain further benefits from the compounds.
In general, removing potential pollutants adds to the manufacturing costs so that there has been considerable impetus for the development of effective steps for achieving this goal. Nevertheless, certain manufacturing processes present a challenging problem for the relatively low cost removal of potential pollutants such as the removal of organic solvents. This problem is much greater if the potential pollutant is to be removed from a rapidly moving vapor stream. For many manufacturing processes, it is necessary to have the vapor stream moving rapidly, sometimes in the order of 600 cubic feet per minute (cfm) or higher.
As used herein, the term "vapor stream" is intended to cover a moving stream containing vapor, or gas, or combinations thereof.
One prior art method of removing an organic solvent from a moving gas stream is to induce the organic solvent in the moving gas stream to condense and the condensed organic solvent is then removed for disposal by burying containers of the solvent. This process has several significant drawbacks. The condensation step as practiced in the prior art is not effective in removing substantially all of the potential pollutants to an acceptable level so that additional steps were required, thereby substantially increasing the costs of removing the pollutants.